Portraiture Quotations

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

There's no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other. There's always a difference. We all have a more or less crooked nose and an irregular mouth.

I remember that at one time I always made a drawing before going to bed!! - Of myself I mean - though I finally destroyed most of them.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin.

Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.

I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.

If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

There is no self-portrait of me.

I don't have lots of things in the background. I do like large faces. I find them strong and contemporary.

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?

My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

I shall praise those faces which seem to project out of the picture as though they were sculptured, and I shall censure those faces in which I see no art but that of outline.

Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface... .

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?

To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.

It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us.

It's really absurd to make... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.

A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.

I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.